Flickr

Subscribe

Spiceweasel 2.0

Posted by mattray on January 14, 2013

One year after the release of Spiceweasel 1.0, Spiceweasel 2.0 is now available! For those of you unfamiliar with Spiceweasel, it is a command-line tool that helps manage loading Chef infrastructure from a manifest file. The JSON or YAML manifest is a simplified representation of the Chef repository contents that you may use to recreate and share how to build the application or infrastructure. This file is validated to ensure that all the components listed are present and the correct versions are available, and can (and should) be managed in version control with the rest of your repository.

There are minor updates to the manifest syntax in 2.0, with a focus on clarity. Spiceweasel has 3 major new features since the 1.0 release :

Execute
Spiceweasel now has the ability to directly execute the knife commands, creating (or deleting or rebuilding) the infrastructure described in the manifest when you use the -e/--execute flag.

Extract
Rather than write your manifest from scratch, Spiceweasel may generate the knife commands or manifests for you. Running spiceweasel --extractlocal generates the knife commands required to upload all the existing cookbooks, roles, environments and data bags found in your Chef repository with validation. spiceweasel --extractjson or spiceweasel --extractyaml will generate the JSON or YAML manifest for your Chef repository, which may be captured and then tracked in version control.

Clusters
Clusters are not a type supported by Chef, this is a logical construct added by Spiceweasel to enable managing sets of infrastructure together. The clusters section is a special case of nodes, where each member of the named cluster in the manifest will be tagged to ensure that the entire cluster may be created in sync (refresh and delete coming soon). The node syntax is the same as that under nodes, the only addition is the cluster name.

Robert Tsaisaid

We are using Spiceweasel pretty heavily with multiple cloud providers and it’s working well. We recently started using ec2 and ran into an issue with spiceweasel –delete. The knife ec2 command needs the –node-name option to delete a node by it’s node name. Is there a way I can pass that in to spiceweasel? (The error below is what I encountered.) Any help would be appreciated.